The intent of education, outreach, and training activities held as part of the VGrADS program is to promote greater participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences, particularly in fields related to grid computing.  To do that, we will be pursuing projects that address graduate, undergraduate and pre-college education, with a focus on supporting Minority Students in Majority Institutions (MSMI), in hopes to directly attack the problem of attrition in the science and engineering workforce.

We have been, and will continue to support the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing, both of which are devoted to increasing diversity in computer and computational science, as both are conferences that focus on diversity in the computational sciences. We will support student travel to both conferences, submit papers, and present panels related to VGrADS research.

At the pre-college level, VGrADS personnel, Richard Tapia and Keith Cooper, PIs of the Computer Science Computer and Mentoring Partnership (CS-CAMP) project, will make presentations at CS-CAMP sessions for teachers and high-school girls and help provide curriculum materials.   These materials may eventually be disseminated nationally through the Engaging People in Cyberinfrastructure (EPIC) network.   CS-CAMP is a summer workshop for high school girls, designed to enhance the interest and persistence of female students in pre-college computer science.

Other VGrADS partners will integrate VGrADS materials into their existing programs, such as UCSB's Grid Computing course and UCSD's Grids and High Performance Computing course.

At the undergraduate level, non-technical students will be involved in VGrADS through a general education course in technology, Information Technology Architectures, which will teach the principles of IT systems without extensive programming.   Ken Kennedy is developing the course, intending it to become the cornerstone of Rice’s CS courses for general education, and eventually scale it to other VGrADS sites.

As VGrADS matures, we hope to develop a standard academic course on Grid architectures and programming systems suitable for both grads and undergrads, expecting that the course will eventually be offered at each of the participating VGrADS institutions.

At the graduate level, we will focus on promoting graduate study at our own institutions, targeting women and underrepresented minorities in particular.   We will also expand the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate at Rice (AGEP) program by funding up to three additional AGEP participants per year to work on Rice VGrADS research.   Those AGEP students will return to their home schools, hopefully forming core support groups for other students there.   We will promote the exchange of students between VGrADS schools for special summer seminars and programs.   Doing this, we could begin fostering an active long-term exchange of graduate students among research groups.   This collaboration will benefit both the students and the research groups.